Founder of the "inconvenient truth," former US Vice President and staunch environmentalist Al Gore is continuing his climate crusade on social media. His latest campaign, “Why? Why Not?” targets young people between the ages of 13 and 21 and enrolls them as advocates of the climate change movement.

Part of the larger Climate Reality Project, Gore turned to WPP, the world's largest communications services group, to launch the campaign.

“Our aim is to frame the problem in a simple, personal way, and to convince people that we cannot leave this to future generations to solve,” WPP group planning director Jon Steel said, according to Adweek.

As part of the campaign, young adults are asked to submit a video via Instagram or YouTube that poses a “Why?” or “Why not?” question about climate change for the upcoming U.N. Climate Summit on September 23. Six individuals will be chosen to fly to New York for the summit and ask their questions in person.Continue reading...

Al Jazeera America, already dubbed AJAM, an offshoot of the Al Jazeera media conglomerate funded by the government of Qatar, is readying to make its debut in a market where it already has history—though it hopes US viewers will quickly forget that.

After buying its way in on the back of Al Gore's failed Current TV, the network, which has 70 offices around the world, has set up shop in dozens of markets across the US, where it is headquartered in New York but also has bureaus in underserved cities including Seattle, Nashville and Detroit. Aiming to corner the nonpartisan, investigative journalism market that has all but disappeared from US news networks, the brand faces a unique and trying flaw in its reputation. Al Jazeera seems to jar only one memory in the minds of Americans—9/11.

Prior to its foray into mainstream US media, Americans had only heard Al Jazeera's name in relation to grainy al-Qaeda videos delivered from the hands of terrorism mastermind Osama Bin Laden and anti-American views on the wars in the Middle East. While years have passed since Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the network of "promoting terrorism," the network is still very conscious of the sensitivities to the brand in the US market—so much so that the new branch's acronym, AJAM, was quickly adopted to create a decided mental break from its parent company and affiliates.Continue reading...

Thomson Reuters' corporate Twitter account is the latest victim of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers that are pro-president Bashar Al-Assad. The group is the same one that claimed responsibility for Twitter hacks on NPR, CBS' 60 Minutes, Al Jazeera and the Associated Press—a hack that caused a drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

For about 45 minutes Monday night, the hackers took over, posting offensive political cartoons—all of which Buzzfeed managed to capture before Twitter suspended the @ThomsonReuters account, which has about 83,000 followers and is seperate from the @Reuters breaking news account.Continue reading...